The event focused on how prescription drugs have fed the region’s opiate crisis and how prescribing is changing.

“The medical community and public safety community have common goals in this. We want to stem the addiction crisis, we want to prevent overdoses, and we want to do all we can to prevent future substance abuse disorders from taking hold because of prescribing practices that need to evolve,” said Morrissey. “It only makes sense that we work together.”

Morrissey organized the first Safe Prescribing Conference of this kind in the state in May 2014; it was replicated in the western part of the state the following year.

“The speakers are largely physicians, pharmacists and our partners in enforcement and professional licensure. We are partnering with Northeastern University’s pharmacy school; the Massachusetts Medical Society has certified today as continuing medical education credits,” Morrissey said. “Our keynote speaker is from the Brigham and Women’s Hospital; members of the boards of registration of medicine, pharmacy and dentistry are on the program.

“..What we know about pain management and the impact of these drugs on individual patients continues to grow and evolve,” Morrissey said. “The continuing education for physicians and other prescribers on those subjects needs to grow and evolve with it.”

Morrissey financed the day-long seminar at the Lantana function facility in Randolph using money that courts have ordered forfeited as part of successful drug prosecutions.

“Interdiction and law enforcement is just one piece of this work,” Morrissey said. “Education is the hope for the future. Our work is often with student populations, law enforcement populations, but today we are joining with those who write and fill prescriptions.

“We want to get these prescribers the best training available to disrupt the relationship between prescription drugs and abuse,” Morrissey said. “We know from investigating hundreds of overdoses that today’s fatalities often took their first opiate years before and exactly as prescribed — then something went wrong.”